[Newspoetry] robert fiske on RTS bombing

[Sam Patterson]

U.K. Journalist Robert Fiske wrote the following piece for the
INDEPENDENT.

-------------------

"Once you kill people because you don't like what they say, you change
the rules of war."

Hanging upside-down from the wreckage was a dead man, in his fifties
perhaps, although a benevolent grey dust had covered his face. Not far
away, also upside-down - his legs trapped between tons of concrete and
steel - was a younger man in a pullover, face grey, blood dribbling from

his head on to the rubble beneath.

Deep inside the tangle of cement and plastic and iron, in what had once
been the make-up room next to the broadcasting studio of Serb
Television,
was all that was left of a young woman, burnt alive when Nato's missile
exploded in the radio control room. Within six hours, the Secretary of
State for International Development, Clare Short, declared the place a
"legitimate target".

It wasn't an argument worth debating with the wounded - one of them a
young
technician who could only be extracted from the hundreds of tons of
concrete in which he was encased by amputating both his legs. Nor with
the
silent hundreds who gathered in front of the still-smoking ruin at dawn
yesterday, lost for words as they stood in the little glade of trees
beside
St Marko's Cathedral, where Belgrade's red and cream trams turn round. A

Belgrade fireman pulled at one of the bodies for all of 30 seconds
before
he realised that the man, swinging back and forth amid the wreckage, was

dead.

By dusk last night, 10 crushed bodies - two of them women - had been
tugged
from beneath the concrete, another man had died in hospital and 15 other

technicians and secretaries still lay buried. A fireman reported hearing
a
voice from the depths as the heavens opened, turning into mud the muck
and
dust of a building that Ms Short had declared to be a "propaganda
machine".


We had all wondered how long it would be before Nato decided that Radio
Televizija Srbija should join the list of "military" targets. Spokesmen
had
long objected to its crude propaganda - it included a Nato symbol
turning
into a swastika and a montage of Madeleine Albright growing Dracula
teeth
in front of a burning building.

It never reported on the tens of thousands of Albanian refugees who
spoke
of executions and "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo. It endlessly repeated
films
that depicted Yugoslav soldiers as idealised heroes defending their
country. It carried soporific tapes of President Slobodan Milosevic
meeting
patriarchs, Cossacks, Russian envoys and the Kosovo Albanian leader
Ibrahim
Rugova. The channel was showing an American interview with Mr Milosevic
when the first cruise missile smashed into the station's control room
just
after two o'clock yesterday
morning.

But did this justify killing the night staff in their studios and taping

rooms? Two weeks ago, Nato's spokesmen had been suggesting that RTS
would
have to carry six hours of Western television a day if it was to survive
-
CNN's bland, safe coverage of events presumably offering some balance to

the rubbish churned out on the RTS news. But once Nato decided this was
as
preposterous as it was impracticable, its spokesman announced that the
station was not on the list of Nato targets. Then, on Monday, CNN's
bosses
called up from Atlanta to inform the satellite boys in Belgrade that
they
should pull out of the RTS offices. Against the wishes of other Nato
nations, so the word went, General Wesley Clark had
decided to bomb Serb television. CNN withdrew from the building in
Takovska
Street. And that night, we were all invited to have coffee and orange
juice
in the studios.

The building was likely to be a target of the "Nato aggressor",
according
to Goran Matic, a Yugoslav federal minister, as he walked us through the

ground floor of the doomed building. Yet, oddly, we did not take him
seriously. Even when the air-raid siren sounded, I stayed for another
coffee. Surely Nato wouldn't waste its bombs on this tiresome station
with
its third-rate propaganda and old movies, let alone kill its staff.

Yesterday morning, the moment I heard the cruise missile scream over my
hotel roof, I knew I was wrong. There was a thunderous explosion and a
mile-high cloud of dust as four storeys collapsed to the ground,
sandwiching offices, machines, transmitters and people into a pile of
rubble only 15 feet high.

Yet, within six hours, Serb television was back on the air, beaming its
programmes from secret transmitters, the female anchorwoman reading the
news from pieces of pink paper between pre-recorded films of Serbian
folk-songs and ancient Orthodox churches. All along, the Serbs had been
ready for just such an attack. We had not believed Nato capable of such
ferocity. The Serbs had.

The crowds still stood in the park as darkness fell, watching the men
with
drills punching their way through the concrete for more survivors. By
that
time, explanations were flowing from Nato's birthday celebrations in
Washington. Serbia's "propaganda machine" had been prolonging the war. I

wonder. I seem to recall Croatian television spreading hatred a-plenty
when
it was ethnically cleansing 170,000 Serbs from Croatia in 1995. But we
didn't bomb Zagreb. And when President Franjo Tudjman's lads were
massacring Serbs and Muslims alike in Bosnia, we didn't bomb his
residence.
Was Serbian television's real sin its
broadcast of film of the Nato massacre of Kosovo Albanian refugees last
week, killings that Nato was forced to admit had been a mistake?

Yes, Serbian television could be hateful, biased, bad. It was owned by
the
government. But once you kill people because you don't like what they
say,
you have changed the rules of war. And that's what Nato did in Belgrade
in
the early hours of yesterday morning.